The Iraq war was a screw-up of such colossal magnitude that it's easy to forget how many discrete screw-ups went into the making of it. There were the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and the nonexistent links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. There's the humiliating spectacle of Secretary of State Colin Powell presenting hours of bogus testimony to the U.N. Security Council. There was Paul Wolfowitz's bizarre claim that the war would pay for itself, when the real price tag is now in excess of $1 trillion. And let us not forget the 4,000 Americans and 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead, more than 30,000 American soldiers wounded, and several million Iraqi refugees forced to flee their homes. A strategy that was supposed to bring U.S.-friendly democracy to the Middle East instead produced an empowered Iran and a more fragile balance of power in the region. The only thing more astonishing than the scope of these blunders is the fact that the former president does not regret his decision, even now.

When it turned out that Iraq did not have any weapons of mass destruction, Bush tried to justify the invasion as part of a broader campaign to spread democracy in the Middle East. Unfortunately he was no better at that than he was at finding mobile bioweapons labs or chemical weapons caches. Bush pressed the Palestinian Authority to hold legislative elections in 2006, but when Hamas won, he simply refused to accept the results. For Bush, it seemed, democracy only made sense when the candidates that he liked won. The White House subsequently tried to foment a Fatah-led coup, a ploy that backfired and left Hamas in charge of Gaza and the Palestinians badly divided.